51社区黑料

Seminar with Leopoldina Fortunati
Thursday, April 16, 2026 | 3:00 PM 鈥� 6:00 PM
Room 2205 鈥� 51社区黑料School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

Radical feminist activist and theorist Leopoldina Fortunati leads a discussion on social reproduction and digital labour

This seminar revisits and builds on the analysis of reproductive labour developed in Italian workerist feminism, specifically Leopoldina Fortunati鈥檚 classic work, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, prostitutes, workers and capital recently released in unabridged translation by Verso. The seminar will reflect on Fortunati鈥檚 classic work, investigating the ways in which its analysis of reproductive labour precedes and might inform contemporary considerations of 鈥渋mmaterial鈥� and 鈥渄igital鈥� labour as sites of theoretical analyses and workplace struggle. Fortunati鈥檚 talk will focus on the gendered implications of digital and robotic technologies for reproductive labour as well as the implications of the diffusion of AI throughout education.

For questions about this event, please contact Enda Brophy: ebrophy@sfu.ca

Suggested readings

Leopoldina Fortunati, Chapter 6, 鈥淭he Hidden Abode: On the Domestic Working Process as a Process of Valorisation鈥� from The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, prostitutes, workers and capital, (London: Verso, 2025), 95鈥�114.

Leopoldina Fortunati and Arlen Austin, 鈥淐hapter 20. Digital Labor and the Domestic Sphere,鈥� in Richard Maxwell, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Shinjoung Yeo eds.,The Handbook of Digital Labor, (Wiley Blackwell, 2025), 372-391.

Find them .

Participants

Leopoldina Fortunati is a radical feminist activist and theorist whose work has spanned a broad range of disciplines from political science and technology studies to histories of sexuality and fashion. She was active in the 1968 student movement and subsequently joined Potere Operaio, a prominent group of the Italian extra-parliamentary left. In the early 1970s, she was one of the founding members of Lotta Femminista, a feminist collective that formed part of the international Wages for Housework movement. She is the author of The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital, originally published in Italian in 1981 and re-released in an expanded English edition by Verso in 2025. With Mariarosa Dalla Costa, she co-authored Brutto Ciao. Direzioni di marcia delle donne negli ultimi 30 anni (1977) and was co-author with Silvia Federici of Il grande Calibano: storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale (1984). She is a senior professor of Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Mathematics, Information Science and Physics at the University of Udine in Italy, where she founded and directed the research laboratory on new media (NuMe) and directed the University's doctoral program in multimedia communication.

Arlen Austin received his PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2024. His work addresses questions of media, value production and reproductive labor. He is co editor with Silvia Federici of The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1979: History, Theory and Documents, and has worked with Sara Colontuono and Leopoldina Fortunati on an updated and expanded translation of the latter's classic work L'arcano della riproduzione, released by Verso in 2025. His writings have appeared in The Sage Handbook of Digital Labor, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Viewpoint, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, among others. He is co-editor with Jaleh Mansoor and Sara Colontuono of Gendered Labour and Clitoredean Revolt. Carla Lonzi and Leopoldina Fortunati, (Vancouver: Fillip, 2024). His works as a research-based artist have been presented at Redcat Gallery, The Bard Hessel Museum, and Exit Art, among other venues.

Enda Brophy is a professor in the School of Communication and the Labour Studies Program at 51社区黑料. With Julie Chen, Alessandro Delfanti, Brian Dolber, Lilly Irani, and Tamara Kneese he is the author of Notes Toward a Digital Workers鈥� Inquiry (Common Notions, 2025). He has translated numerous works by Italian scholars, including Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa鈥檚 The Work of Love: Unpaid Housework, Poverty and Sexual Violence at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Autonomedia, 2008) and Gigi Roggero鈥檚 The Production of Living Knowledge: Crisis of the University and Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America (Temple University Press, 2011). He is a co-founder of , a coalition of 51社区黑料workers, faculty, students and community members fighting to end the outsourcing of food and cleaning services at SFU.

Jaleh Mansoor is a writer and an associate professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where she teaches modern and contemporary art history with an emphasis on Post WWII European Art. Her areas of interest, in addition to art and its histories, include Materialist Formalism and Marxist Feminism. Mansoor鈥檚 first monographic book, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia was published by Duke UP in 2016. Her latest primary project, titled after Picabia鈥檚 eponymous homage to a passage in Marx鈥檚 Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, is Universal Prostitution: A Counter History of Modernism, which came out with Duke University Press in May 2025. It traces the historical and structural entwinement of aesthetic and real (or concrete) abstraction -- defined as the extraction of labor power valorized by transactional exchange on the market 鈥� over 20th C art to offer a comprehensive account of the political economic forces that motivated modernist abstraction and the advent of post-humanism.

51社区黑料 lies on the unceded territories of the Musqueum, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, Kwikwetlem, Katzie, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, and St贸:lo Nations.

The organizers would like to thank the 51社区黑料School for the Contemporary Arts for hosting this event.